Review: Foreign Ministries
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Greg Donaghy |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200005500121 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
is
actually
about.)
In
a
study
of
previous
Chinese
experiments
with
democracy,
Nathan
argues
that
the
Chinese
tradition
incorporates
many
'proto-modern,
proto-liberal,
and
even
proto-democratic
values
...
which
could
conceivably
serve
as
some
of
the building
blocks
of
a
Chinese democratic
political
culture.' Indeed
these
values
are
invoked
by
many
of
those
within
China
now
striving
to
accelerate
the
transi-
tion
Nathan
hopes
for.
Several
chapters
are
devoted
to
Nathan's
massive
and
pioneering sur-
vey
of
Chinese
political
attitudes,
conducted
with
Shi
Tianjian.
This
in
turn
leads
to
reflection
on
methodological
issues
in social
science,
but
Nathan
ignores
perhaps the
most
central
issue.
What
if
survey
respon-
dents
don't
know,
or
don't
tell
the
surveyor,
what
they
really
think?
Every
adult
in
China
has
been
profoundly
shaped
by
the
Great
Leap
Forward,
the
Cultural
Revolution,
and
the decision
to
implement
market
reform.
That
70
per
cent
of
Nathan's
respondents
state
that
government
policies
do
not
affect
them
may
speak
to
the
naivete
or
delusion
of
his
respondents,
or
to
their
understandable
suspicions
of
the
uses
to which the
information
will
be
put, but
I
suspect
it
tells us
little
about
political
culture
in
contemporary
China.
Nathan
is
committed
to
what
he
labels
evaluative
universalism,
a
call
not
to
proselytize
Western
values
but
to
confront,
compare,
and
ulti-
mately
judge
value
differences
among
cultures.
He
is
well
aware
that
this
framework
provides
few
real
answers
to
the
most
fundamental
question
raised here:
What
can
and should
be
done,
by
Chinese
and
non-Chinese
alike,
to
promote
the
speedy realization
of
China's
demo-
cratic potential? But the
thoughtful
reader, weary
of
the
often
ill-
informed judgments
of
politicians and
media
pundits,
will
still
be
grateful for
Nathan's
profound
reflections.
Michael Szonyi/University
of
Toronto
FOREIGN
MINISTRIES
Change
and
adaptation
Edited
by Brian
Hocking
Basingstoke
and
New
York:
Macmillan/St
Martin's,
1999, xiv,
2 8 1
pp,
us$65.00
For
many
observers, today's
foreign
ministries
(FMs)
seem
an
odd
sort
of
endangered
species.
Traditional
diplomacy
and
its
practitioners
are
threatened
by
the
steady
diffusion
of
power
and
influence
among com-
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Winter
1999-2000
163
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